Elena Antonacopoulou

American University of Beirut Mediterraneo

After many years of dominant anti-utopianism, there has been a resurgent and fruitful interest in utopian thought across disciplines. In our uncertain times, many theorists call for a rethinking of what counts as a desirable future. We respond to this call from an interdisciplinary perspective on the interconnectedness, and potential common cause,...

This article builds on previous work that has investigated character development within leadership learning. We take up the analogy of developing character through ‘being in a village’. We do so by gaining unique access to leadership learning within a Norwegian military academy (the village). We take a Bakhtinian perspective in analysing the data,...

In this paper, we dig deeper into the reflexive learning that fuels collaborative inquiry by examining the unique ways in which changing itself takes place. We draw on two examples of collaborative inquiry, offering autoethnographic insights from our own lived experiences of changing change. These insights are underpinned by reflexive learning whic...

At the centre of responsible management (RM) learning is the development of managerial competence for ethics, responsibility, and sustainability (ERS). Important contributions have been made from each: the ethics, responsibility, and sustainability disciplines. However, we are yet to integrate these disciplinary contributions into a comprehensive i...

In this paper I elaborate on the design and dimensions of interorganisational collaborations particularly when the purpose of connecting is the co-creation of knowledge for impact. I extend recent accounts of co-creating knowledge and explain why co-creation is integral to the “common good” logic especially when the focus of partnering for impact e...

The COVID-19 pandemic altered the ways academics work and live by creating a context during the spring of 2020 where working from home was largely mandatory and where for cohabiting workers, the home as workplace was simultaneously occupied by all household members during working hours (and beyond). Using a multi-method qualitative approach, we exa...

Navigating complexity remains one of the key pragmatic challenges that call for temporal organizing as a response. Whilst project-based organizing is established as an approach integral to temporal organizing we still know little about the lived experiences of project managers as they enact it through the judgements guiding their action choices. We...

The education and training of internal auditors is an example of management learning which has received limited attention in management education journals. This paper presents the lessons from an action research inquiry designed to reconfigure the Internal Auditing function to address the problem of a conformance mindset and compliance-based approa...

This collective essay was born out of a desire to honor and remember Professor Mark Easterby-Smith, a founder of the Management Learning community. To do this, we invited community members to share their experiences of working with Mark. The resulting narratives remember Mark as a co-author, co-researcher, project manager, conference organizer, res...

At this critical juncture when the COVID‐19 health crisis has disrupted our ways of living, working and relating to each other, we are perforce to explore and cocreate the Future we want to be part of. Drawing upon feminist theory, we introduce the notion of ‘inclusiveness’ as a fresh conceptualization of the impact of meaning rendering from workin...

The emerging field of responsible management learning is characterized by an urgent need for transdisciplinary practices. We conceptualize constellations of transdisciplinary practices by building up on a social practice perspective. From this perspective knowledge and learning are 'done' in interrelated practices that may span multiple fields like...

We extend the Entrepreneurship as Practice debate by making the case for the lived experience of entrepreneuring, i.e. when entrepreneurship is practised as part of the everyday, seizing moments that define action as entrepreneurial. We focus not only on the enactment and embodiment of entrepreneurial practices but also their emplacement. Emplaceme...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the premise that organizationally defined communities of practice can be a valuable strategic learning tool for management. Design/methodology/approach It is a quantitative study in a single organization. The authors analyzed data from 1,082 employees using hierarchical (multi-level) linear modeling....

How do we understand the nature of organizational creativity when dealing with complex, composite ideas rather than singular ones? In response to this question, we problematize assumptions of the linearity of creative processes and the singularity of ideas in mainstream creativity theory. We draw on the work of Bakhtin and longitudinal research in...

We extend the Entrepreneurship as Practice debate by making the case for the lived experience of entrepreneuring, i.e. when entrepreneurship is practised as part of the everyday, seizing moments that define action as entrepreneurial. We focus not only on the enactment and embodiment of entrepreneurial practices but also their emplacement. Emplaceme...

This Volume has extended the idea of using Sensuous Learning to foster better practical judgement in professional practice across levels from the individual, to communities and the organisations where professional work is conducted. More specifically, it has offered examples of how Arts-Based Interventions have been used in advancing new modes of l...

The case put forward in Volume 1 for Sensuous Learning as new learning theory has focused on explicating the process, conditions and impacts that it promotes in the sensuousness it invokes.

Purpose This paper aims to revive the old idea of the Learning Organisation by providing a fresh conceptualisation and illustration. The New Learning Organisation is conceptualised, focussing on the common good through responsible action. It is positioned as responding to the VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity, Bennett and Lemo...

Purpose The purpose of this paper – PART II – is to present the lived experiences of Sensuous Organisational Learning drawn from the educational practices and learning culture of the Norwegian Defence University College, Royal Norwegian Air Force Academy’s (RNoAFA) approach to growing (Military) leaders. Design/methodology/approach The paper ref...

The recent launch of a major report (In Professions We Trust) in the British House of Lords, highlights that the eroding trust in professions and professionals (bankers, doctors, lawyers), is a grand challenge of our times (Blond et al. 2015). This challenge cannot be addressed through more regulation using codes of ethical conduct or indeed calls...

This Volume has explored the idea of using Sensuous Learning to foster better practical judgement in professional practice. More specifically, it has offered examples of how arts-based methods have been used in advancing new modes of learning.

This chapter introduces the fundamental motivation of why to develop Sensuous Learning, what it means, and why it matters in restoring trust in professions and professionals. This trust has been compromised by the ineptitude that professional practices often reflect in the ways they are performed. Ineptitude is the condition where professionals do...

The first volume of this ground-breaking book critically examines how and why arts-based methods such as choir conducting workshops and dialogue improvisation can make a difference in improving professional practice. Taking a ‘human-centred’ approach, it delivers an insightful account of what these approaches do differently to achieve a new mode of...

This chapter extends the theoretical framing of Sensuous Learning presented in Chapter 2 of Volume 1 to elaborate how such learning can be operationalised to support not only professionals as individuals, but also in the communities and in the organisations where professional work is conducted. The focus here is to present a marked contribution of...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present a new approach to leadership development founded on the principle of the Leader-as-Learner: a reflective human who pursues the 4C – virtues of courage, commitment, confidence and curiosity, rather than the laurels of traditional approaches of heroic leadership. Design/methodology/approach Exploring...

This paper presents a fresh conceptualisation of critical action learning by energising critique in action and in learning, embedding this as integral to Continuous Professional Development (CPD). The criticality that action learning promotes could be most impactful, in fostering a mode of learning – Learning in Crisis – that cultivates reflexive c...

Germanwings Flight 9525 (GW9525) was lost in the French Alps in 2015 when, a co-pilot committed suicide killing in the process 150 passengers and crew. We analyze events to show that this is not a case of sensemaking collapse, typical of analyses of crises incidents in the existing literature. We introduce a lapse in reflexivity and argue that GW95...

This chapter makes the case to turn our attention to innovation in Human Resource Management (HRM) as we explore the relationship between innovation and HRM. The focus on innovation in HRM is achieved through a reconceptualisation of the meaning of management (man-agement) in HRM as a practice of personal and collective growth. Reconceptualising HR...

Despite the recent hype what practice means remains unclear at best. This paper presents a fresh perspective on practice as a social phenomenon in Management and Organization Studies. It focuses on the dynamic nature of practice and draws attention to the power of tensions within and between practices as a reflection of the social complexity of org...

The literature on ambidexterity is dominated by theoretical development and does not fully explain how ambidexterity is enacted. There is limited focus on the managerial actions in day-to-day operations that enable this important phenomenon. We posit that projects offer an ideal context to investigate the actions that enable ambidexterity, since th...

Based on a longitudinal study of 200 Middle Managers’ lived experiences of organizational change in three Retail banks in the UK, this paper sheds new light on the role of practical judgment (phronesis) in forming their predisposition towards change. This focus on the way managers give voice to an otherwise silent process of forming judgments provi...

The Symposium brings together a broad range of Business School stakeholders including leading scholars, deans, employers, alumni, and business education media representatives. Panel members will present different perspectives on the current state of Business Schools' Programs rankings. These rankings became very important for many leading business...

In this symposium, senior scholars and executives who have been actively engaged in studying the dynamics of management and organization practices especially strategizing and project managing join forces to account for fresh ways in which such dynamism can be captured through empirical research that reveals processes like practising, idea work and...

We critically assess a common approach to scholarly impact that relies almost exclusively on a single stakeholder (i.e., other academics). We argue that this approach is narrow and insufficient, and thereby threatens the credibility and long-term sustainability of the management research community. We offer a solution in the form of a broader and n...

Elena P. Antonacopoulou is Professor of Organizational Behaviour at the University of Liverpool Management School where she leads GNOSIS, a research initiative advancing collaborative research in management and organization studies. Her principal research interests include change, learning and knowledge practices in organizations, and the developme...

This symposium will encourage a robust conversation around two words with much currency in the Academy, “impact” and “usefulness” as they apply to the influence of management research on government policy and regulation specifically, and broader society more generally. The symposium builds upon growing recognition within the Academy that our resear...

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to our understanding of knowledge integration and dis-integration by revealing some of the conditions that support or hinder the management of knowledge especially in relation to Knowledge Management interventions. For the purposes of this analysis knowledge integration (thereafter KI) is defined as the pr...

This paper examines the time dimensions of organizational learning. While several recent studies have addressed aspects of time in relation to organizational learning, the topic of time has received little attention in reviews of the field and this promising domain of research is fragmented. The objective of this paper is to bring these dispersed c...

books and training departments. However, in recent years we seem to be witnessing fewer inspirational examples of good leadership, and instead are faced with myriad examples of corruption and misbehaviour from our so-called leaders. The recent actions of bankers, sports bodies, corporate directors and politicians, have all made the concept of moral...

This article introduces the concept of learning in crisis (LiC) as a new mode of learning especially in turbulent times. Drawing on a theoretical integration of the organizational learning and crisis management literatures, LiC challenges the basic assumptions that inform hitherto analyses of learning in relation to crisis-beset organizations. LiC...

The theme of the Academy of Management Orlando 2013 Conference on “Capitalism in Question” provides a unique opportunity to critically reflect on the ways in which we both define and account for impact. Capitalism as an idea, as much as an economic system, has emerged over time in ways that its effects could not have been predicted and its conseque...

Purpose This empirical paper aims to show how communities of practice have been used as a tractable management tool to operationalize strategy in practice. The analysis shows how CoPs can be used in business to find traction in order to achieve strategic goals. Design/methodology/approach A two‐year longitudinal case study approach was adopted emp...

This article develops a dialogic perspective on practising and knowing management. It builds on prior work which has considered the nature of management research as well as the relationship between those who research organizations and those that manage them. The article argues that practising and knowing are co-constitutive, dialogic processes and...

This paper explores how founders’ blueprints affect the dynamism of organizational practices, and in particular the capability to sustain as well as change practices. First, a theoretical argument is developed on the critical role of founders’ blueprints of the employment model, which are difficult to alter and mark firms’ future paths by affecting...

Knowledge and learning have become omnipresent terms within the discourse of organisational research (Grant, 1996; Spender, 1996), while being widely acknowledged as important strategic assets for organisations (Nonaka, 1994). The scope of organisational learning and knowledge research has also developed significantly in the last 20 years. A preocc...

This paper contributes to our understanding of personal mastery by providing fresh insights from a cross-national study in Higher Education (HE). It presents findings from a rich sample of informants in two well-established universities in the UK and Vietnam, and develops a framework that illustrates the antecedents and outcomes of personal mastery...

This article articulates the nature of the challenge of the academic—practitioner “divide” as one of delivering impact. While measurable impact of research on organizational practice is a key indicator of the value of academic work, the authors explore possibilities of sustainable impact by exploiting and maintaining similarities and differences th...

The focus of this chapter is to address one of the critical future challenges in management research; namely, embracing the 'global' character of research. A case will be made that amidst the concerns of globalization there is perhaps scope to embrace a global orientation towards research as it provides a basis for transcending beyond limits of cou...

The concept of Learning-in-Crisis is introduced which provides a fresh perspective to the current Organizational Learning debate and in particular the link between learning in relation to organizational failure and crisis. LiC is conceptualized as a mode of learning involving experimentation and practising as central to the balancing act between em...

This chapter argues that one of the fundamental challenges of the global character of strategy research is the growing need to foster collaborations between academic and business practitioners that can help build a better understanding of the practice of strategy and through these means deliver greater impact. This challenge strengthens existing ca...

This article aims to shift the conversation from politics to purpose in co-production research by introducing practice-relevant scholarship as a foundation for delivering impact through powerful ideas. The article is intended as an invitation to re-engage in research practice mindful of the multiplicity of impacts it can deliver. A greater sensitiz...

Purpose Socialization is one of the fundamental processes that define how collectivities emerge. Socialization underpins the social structures that shape not only how social actors interact in community but also the boundaries of action and the rules of engagement. In the context of organizations, socialization is a process that significantly shape...

Purpose At the core of how societies operate, lies social interaction. Organizations as significant social bodies rely on social interaction both to get things done in order to remain sustainable and to also impart a contribution to the wider society. Understanding the dynamics of social interactions in the way social agents and social action take...

This paper explores how the business school can become more critical by advancing the notion of reflexive critique. Drawing on diverse literatures propounding a critical perspective, this paper integrates the various interpretations of ‘what it is to be critical’ and proposes phronesis as a foundation for responding to and extending the relevance a...

In this paper, we review two significant events that were held up to the scrutiny of public inquiry in the UK. We suggest that outcomes of such reviews results in policy learning that is captured in new rules and regulations that may be more to do with learning lessons rather than creating the capacity to develop more effective practices. If policy...

Research on organizational memory (OM) lacks a dynamic perspective that shows how OM is continuously recreated and enacted over the course of time. In this paper, we intend to fill up this research gap and integrate OM with knowledge of staff induction and organizational recreation. We provide a theoretical analysis of the continuous recreation of...

This essay explores what is impact, why it matters and how it may be demonstrated through management scholarship that integrates both rigour and relevance. Attention is drawn to the importance of understanding the dynamic nature of practice and practising as critical processes that set important foundations for extending both the questions we ask a...